This page is a compendium of items of interest - news stories, scurrilous rumors, links, academic papers, damnable prevarications, rants and amusing anecdotes - about LAUSD and/or public education that didn't - or haven't yet - made it into the "real" 4LAKids blog and weekly e-newsletter at http://www.4LAKids.blogspot.com . 4LAKidsNews will be updated at arbitrary random intervals.

Friday, May 10, 2013

U P D A T E D: MATH BY WAY OF ART + PASADENA CENTER AT FOREFRONT OF EARLY MATH PROGRAMS FOR YOUNG CHILDREN

MATH BY WAY OF ART: For Pasadena school, arts plus math is really adding up

Mary Plummer/KPCC - Third grade student Eder counts the amount he'll need to purchase art supplies to create a sculpture. The project is part of a grant funded endeavor that places teaching artists from the Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts with classroom teachers to help them teach integrated arts lessons.

May 10th, 2013, 6:00am :: Administrators and teachers are grappling with how to boost math scores to prepare students for an increasingly technology based work force.

Jefferson Elementary in Pasadena may hold some of the answers. The school's been using art to teach its students math.

On a recent visit, students were working on an elaborate art project. They were asked to sketch two ideas that would later become a 3D sculpture. The catch – the students were given a budget and a price list and could only use the art supplies they could afford.

Along with budgeting, the school's students have worked on art projects that helped them learn place value and the concepts of area and perimeter. But unlike dry textbook problems, the projects brought lessons to life.

"Even my more challenged students -- and I have about five of them -- the engagement is like 180 degrees. It’s like a different child," said third-grade teacher Beverly Grotts.

The program, called "Artful Connections with Math," was developed by the Pasadena Unified School District and the Armory Center for the Arts. Funded by a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, it pairs classroom teachers like Grotts with "teaching artists" who show them how to use hands-on, visual art projects to teach math concepts.

The instruction targets creative problem solving skills and helps students connect the dots between math and other subjects.

"The sooner we can teach our kids how all these subjects interweave, I think the better off we are," said teaching artist Melanie Moore Bermudez, who works with Grottts.

This is one of many novel approaches educators are experimenting with to teach math. Across the state, elementary students' math proficiency rates have been lagging behind those in English and science.

The California Alliance for Arts Education wants to replicate Jefferson's program. It's testing a similar approach at 10 pilot schools around the state this fall.

It's part of an effort to encourage Title I schools, which receive extra federal funding to support low income students, to use those funds for arts-based instruction of core subjects. More than half of all California schools are Title I schools.

Because Title I funds are earmarked for things like English and math, many Title I schools have been afraid to use the funding for arts teachers -- even if they’re using arts to teach the core subjects.

"Somehow the arts remain an outlier and perceived as: well that’s not exactly math and that’s not exactly literacy so how do we justify it," said Joe Landon, who heads the California Alliance for Arts Education.

The group published a paper last month outlining the process for schools.

All of this, Landon explains, will help close the gap between public schools where parents are able to supplement arts education and typically poorer schools where they are not. Since the budget crisis, arts education has been decimated in much of Southern California.

"What we’re really trying to do here is address an issue of education equity that we feel that every student deserves an equal opportunity to receive the benefits of arts education and arts education strategies as part of a complete education," he said.

Jefferson Elementary is a Title I school, but the principal, Amin Oria, said she’s in triage mode and can’t spare any of next year’s approximately $95,000 budget on arts integration. She has other things she has to spend money on like salaries for support staff to help improve literacy rates.

Still, she loves the hand-0n instruction, pointing out that it's especially useful for students whose first language is not English. Almost 90 percent of the school's students are Latino and more than 50 percent of them speak English as a second language.

For all students, she said problem solving in small groups help the math lesson to sink in.

Grotts, the third grade teacher, likes the arts teaching techniques so well, she's now using them in her everyday teaching. Her students often draw in their journals and learn things like the benefits and traps of credit cards.

As her students get more comfortable with art, she does too. She was a sociology major in college and struggled to draw stick figures before becoming a teacher.

"I’m amazed at how much I’m able to take in," she said. "I don’t have that wall as much as I used to have."

PASADENA CENTER AT FOREFRONT OF EARLY MATH PROGRAMS FOR YOUNG CHILDREN

A 2-year-old boy looks through a tube while playing at The Children’s Center at Caltech in Pasadena on April 8. Credit: Lillian Mongeau, EdSource Today

May 5th, 2013 :: PASADENA — While many preschools struggle to integrate math into their programs, an early education center housed at the California Institute of Technology has long made math a central pillar in a program that uses the scientific method to engage children as young as 6 months old.

The Children’s Center at Caltech, which places a significant focus on math and science, may provide a model for other courses to follow. Researchers say a strong grasp of early math concepts is a critical step to ensure student success.

Children who enter kindergarten with an understanding of basic math concepts – like where a number might fall on a number line – were more likely to be succeeding in math and reading by fifth grade, according to a 2007 study by economist Greg Duncan from the University of California, Irvine.

Yet few early childhood education certification or degree courses require math classes and few offer explicit instruction in math, according to a December EdSource report on early math. While basic mathematical ideas like counting and shapes are often part of preschool instruction, far more time is spent on literacy skills, researchers have found. A study of programs in North Carolina and Tennessee found that half-day preschools spent only five minutes a day on math, compared to nearly 20 minutes on reading.

The idea at The Children’s Center is that the scientific method – ask a question, guess an answer, experiment, observe, conclude – provides the best basis for learning any topic, including math. The center’s director, Susan Wood, designed the curriculum with a focus on allowing young children to predict how something will work, test their idea and observe the result as a part of nearly every activity. (See slideshow below for a photo tour of the center’s hands-on activities.)

“Science is the perfect umbrella because everything falls under it,” said Wood, who has run her program for 13 years out of three buildings on the edge of Caltech’s sprawling Pasadena campus. Science is the study of the whole world, something young children do naturally, Wood said. So whether children are figuring out that a dropped ball will fall down every time or puzzling out the alphabet, Wood thinks learning the steps of the scientific method will help children to know their world and become more engaged learners. “That’s not true with literacy,” she said.

Every room at The Children’s Center, starting with the infant room and moving up to the 4- and 5-year-old room, is stuffed with activities designed with the principle of scientific engagement in mind.

Blocks displayed in the infant room at The Children’s Center at Caltech are meant to illustrate the concepts of “over” and “under.” Credit: Lillian Mongeau, EdSource Today

At first glance, the rooms look like preschool rooms anywhere, but each toy or game has been chosen with a specific learning target in mind. A low shelf in the infant room holds squishy blocks and plastic figures in easy reach of crawling and toddling babies, but these blocks were deliberately chosen to illustrate the principles of “over,” “under” and “through.” The blocks are displayed so that they form an archway, with one figure on top of the arch and another underneath it. This deliberate placement helps students begin to understand one of the fundamental ideas of geometry: how objects can be described in relation to other objects. The concept is so basic for adults, it’s easy to forget that it must be explicitly taught to young children in order for them to develop the spatial reasoning needed for many math-related challenges.

This kind of careful planning extends to all of the materials at The Children’s Center: there is no chaos here, no jumbled toy boxes.

That’s on purpose, Wood said. A box full of toys is “too challenging,” she said, because it presents materials in a senseless, disorganized way. “Children should be able to read the environment and the environment should instruct,” she said.

Wood doesn’t expect the environment alone to provide instruction. Teachers interact with kids throughout the day, asking open-ended questions like: “What do you think will happen if you do that?” and “Why do you think that happened?” They don’t offer specific answers very often, instead encouraging children to come up with their own answers. They also lead group activities like music lessons and planting and caring for classroom plants, and significant portions of the day are dedicated to free play.

Such open-ended questioning – encouraging students to puzzle through problems – is considered a best practice among early childhood experts, but the method is not always in evidence in California’s many preschool classrooms. Part of that may be that many teachers have less training and aren’t as well compensated as those Wood employs. She requires and provides ongoing professional training for her lead and assistant teachers and asks all her teachers, even assistant teachers, to hold or be working toward a child development permit, the state’s minimum requirement for lead teachers. She also pays them on a sliding scale based on experience and qualifications that ranges from just under $40,000 to nearly $50,000 annually. That’s more than twice what a Head Start teacher in the state can expect to make.

The interaction with teachers, coupled with the activities offered at The Children’s Center, can help prepare children to tackle higher level math, research has found. For example, children in Wood’s program might play a game that involves arranging colored dice into a specific sequence. The ability to recognize patterns is a key skill in helping students puzzle out mathematical problems later on, experts say. For instance, multiplication tables and prime numbers are much easier to learn if one understands how to discern patterns.

Ariana Hosseini, 3, extends a pattern of blue and yellow blocks in her preschool classroom at The Children’s Center at Caltech. Credit: Lillian Mongeau, EdSource Today

In contrast, Wood said, knowing the order of the letters in the alphabet is not important to learning how to read.

“Kids have amazing intuition for basic math concepts and it’s really a matter of providing the vocabulary and support to translate this intuitive knowledge into more concrete math skills that will be the foundation for later math learning,” said UC Irvine’s Duncan.

Wood guarantees 89 of her 99 slots to the children of faculty, students and staff at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in exchange for free rent on the campus. The full-day program serves children from 6 months to 4 years old and is offered year-round. The waiting list has five times as many children on it as the number of students who are admitted. There is no application process other than proving your connection to the university. “We just work with what we’ve got,” Wood said.

Tuition ranges from $14,400 to $18,600 for full-time care depending on the age of the child, about the standard range for private preschool in California.

Wood’s unique curriculum has its origins in the early care and education department at University of California, Los Angeles, where Wood taught at the children’s center on campus in the early ’90s. When Wood was first hired, the university had just received a grant from NASA to explore the best ways to teach science to young children, said Gay Macdonald, executive director of UCLA’s Early Care and Education program.

“Teachers like Susan just get it. It’s not foreign and difficult for them (to teach science and math),” Macdonald said. “Others who are literacy and art focused probably felt one advantage in this field (of early education) is you might never be required to take a math class.”

No studies have been conducted to track the success of students after they leave Wood’s program, although Wood has worked to explain her methods to other educators by speaking at conferences and teaching in early education programs at community colleges.

The program at UCLA, headed by Macdonald, has made an even larger push to spread its findings about how to teach math and science to young children, including publishing a textbook and consulting with the Jim Henson Company to develop the animated children’s show “Sid the Science Kid”. (Fair warning: The link to “Sid the Science Kid” plays music.) The textbook is even about to go international. It’s getting translated into Chinese.

Early educators in the United States are good at teaching social-emotional skills, music and literacy, Wood said, and she thinks it’s past time to add math and science to that list.

“We miss opportunities (to teach) math,” Wood said, “because we’re just not as strong in mathematics as we are in other areas.”